AMD Catalyst 11.2 Released

AMD's latest driver suite, Catalyst 11.2, has been posted on AMD's site. Bringing a bevy of bugfixes and optimizations to the table, AMD continues along its monthly release schedule as promised. The majority of the improvements pertain to performance enhancements and added features for the Radeon HD 5000-series cards.

New features for 11.2 are described in the following list taken from AMD's site:

• Catalyst AI Texture Filtering updates
  •  The Quality setting has now been improved
    to match the High Quality setting in all respects but one;  it enables
    an optimization that limits tri-linear anisotropic filtering to areas
    surrounding texture mipmap level transitions, while doing bilinear
    anisotropic filtering elsewhere.  This optimization offers a way to
    improve filtering performance without visibly affecting image quality
  •  The Performance setting has been updated to
    address the sharpness of the default Quality setting causing shimmering
    in certain cases.  It now provides a smoother filtering option that
    eliminates most shimmering while preserving the improved detail provided
    by anisotropic filtering.
•  Tessellation Controls
  •  Supported on the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series and the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
  •  New settings give users full control over the Tessellation levels used in applications.
    •  The default selection “AMD Optimized” setting is
      intended to set the best level of Tessellation on a per application
      basis.   The “AMD Optimized” setting is designed to help users get the
      maximum visual benefit of Tessellation, while minimizing the performance
      impact associated with enabling Tessellation.    Currently no
      applications have been profiled.
    •  The “Use Application Settings” option gives applications full control over the Tessellation level.
    •  Users can also manually set the maximum tessellation level used by applications with the slider control
•  Morphological Anti-Aliasing support for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
  •  AMD Catalyst now includes official support for Morphological Anti-Aliasing for the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series

 Support Video Quality settings during Blu-ray 3D playback

•  Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
•  Requires Blu-ray 3D player software, 3D supported display and 3D Stereoscopic glasses
•  Users can now enable the Video Quality settings within the Catalyst Control Center when playing Blu-ray 3D content

Performance Improvements:

• Call of Duty: Black Ops:
  • Performance
    increases up to 11% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Series single card
    configurations with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing enabled
• Batman Arkham Asylum:
  • Performance
    increases up to 4% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Series single configurations
    with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled.